The
small village of Coberley is situated not far from
Cheltenham. Access to the parish church is through an
arched doorway and across a private farmyard. The church
houses a number of interesting monuments, including a
small wall memorial depicting the half-length figure of
a knight clasping a large object in both hands (Fig. 2
below). This memorial commemorates the heart burial of
Sir Giles II de Berkeley (1240–1294), who gfought in the
Crusades and whose body was buried in Little Malvern
(Worcestershire). It is claimed by some to be the only
memorial of its kind in the Cotswolds, but that is far
from true: a second such heart tomb is located within
the same church, just opposite Sir Giles’s memorial.

Fig 2.

When viewing the large double monument of Sir Giles’s
son Sir Thomas I de Berkeley (1289–1365) and his wife
Joan, visitors may be forgiven for assuming the
diminutive tomb alongside it is to commemorate the
couple’s unnamed daughter (Fig. 1 and 3). This is how it
has often been incorrectly described in guidebooks in
the past and perhaps still today. True, there is nothing
child-like about this small fourteenth-century tomb
effigy apart from its size, but its appearance might
easily confirm the popular misconception that medieval
children were regarded as miniature adults. The figure
is certainly dressed like an adult and her feet rest on
what appears to be a dog – the conventional footrest for
female effigies.

Fig 3.

Yet
this rather sentimental reading of the monument must
make way for a perhaps less palatable one, for this
miniature effigy probably commemorates not a child but
an adult – or at least the heart of an adult. If we
study the effigy closely (Fig. 4), it becomes evident
that the figure does not have her hands raised in the
conventional attitude of prayer. Instead she holds a
glove in the left hand and with the right hand she
reaches into her bodice, thereby indicating the heart
that was removed from her body after death and buried
separately on this spot. In 1931 Ida Roper already
hinted at this possibility when she wrote that ‘no
decided opinion has been formed by antiquaries
concerning the meaning of this and similar diminutive
effigies – whether they represent children or adults, or
are placed over the heart buried beneath’.

Fig 4.

The medieval custom of burying the heart – and sometimes
also the flesh and the viscera – of the deceased was
originally intended for people who died far away from
their preferred burial site. In order to preserve the
corpse for transport the body was embalmed by removing
the internal organs (evisceration) and burying these
separately. Sometimes just the bones were preserved by
boiling the body, a process known as excarnation. An
early example is that of the Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick I Barbarossa (b. 1122 – d. 1190), who drowned
in the Göksu (then Saleph) River on the Third Crusade:
the plan was to bury him in Jerusalem, but when efforts
to preserve his corpse in vinegar proved unsuccessful it
was decided to bury his flesh in Antioch, his bones in
Tyre and his heart and internal organs in Tarsus

A
famous English example is that of Queen Eleanor of
Castile (b. 1240 – d. 1291), who underwent triple burial
after her death in the village of Harby outside Lincoln.
Her husband Edward I had her viscera buried in Lincoln
Cathedral, her heart in the Dominican convent of
Blackfriars in London and her body in Westminster Abbey,
where her gilt copper-alloy effigy may still be seen:
her viscera and heart memorials were lost centuries ago.

Division of the corpse actually became a matter of
prestige among royalty and the aristocracy across
Europe, irrespective of where the deceased had died. It
allowed people to show their allegiance to a particular
church or order, while there was the additional benefit
of prayers to be said for their souls in different
locations. For example, Robert the Bruce (b. 1274 – d.
1329) was buried in Dunfermline Abbey, but he had wished
his heart to be buried in the church of the Holy
Sepulchre in Jerusalem in token of his vow to undertake
a crusade against the Saracens. When Sir James Douglas,
to whom the heart had been entrusted, was killed in
battle fighting the Moorish kings of Granada, the silver
casket was recovered and interred at Melrose Abbey
(Roxburghshire). Although the church frowned on bodily
division and papal degrees forebade the practice, it was
possible to obtain dispensation. The custom continued in
modern times, for example among
the Habsburgs in Vienna.

The
Berkeley family seem to have been particularly keen on
division of the corpse. Apart from Sir Giles’s heart
memorial in Coberley, three more miniature effigies can
still be found on the window sills of the nave of St
Mary’s church next to the family seat of Berkeley
Castle, of which two were probably holding hearts:
these, too, have frequently been mistaken for child
effigies and one may compare the famous case of the
so-called ‘Stanley boy’ monument in Elford
(Staffordshire), which was the Monument of the Month in
January 2010. The unknown female whose heart was buried
in Coberley presumably belonged to the Berkeley family
as well.

● Warntjes, Immo,
‘Programmatic double burial (body and heart) of the
European high nobility,
c.1200-1400. Its origin, geography, and functions’, in Karl-Heinz
Spieß and Immo Warntjes (eds),
Death at court
(Wiesbaden, 2012), 197-259.